There's a word that shows up in almost every brand's marketing deck, website hero section, and press release: innovative. And the more it gets used, the less it means.
Here's the thing about innovation: it has a shelf life. At some point, your differentiator stops being a differentiator. The horse and buggy was revolutionary until the car came along. Once the car existed, you couldn't point to the buggy and call it progress. The market had moved, and the innovation was spent.
Gore-Tex is a perfect example of this in the outdoor industry. When it launched, it genuinely changed the game. Waterproof, breathable fabric felt like wizardry. But that was 40-plus years ago. Today, Gore-Tex isn't innovation. It just is. It's a baseline expectation, and brands that still lead with it as their differentiator are essentially bragging about keeping up.
And honestly? At a certain point, it gets a little cringy. If you have to tell people you're inventive, but your invention is a decade old, the claim starts working against you. Audiences aren't naive. They notice when a brand is coasting on a founding story instead of doing anything new with it. After five years, that story needs to evolve or it becomes a liability.
The brands worth watching don't announce their innovation, they demonstrate it. Full disclosure, I work at VOORMI, so I'm biased, but I think they're a good example of this. The focus is on textile innovation using natural fibers, constantly pushing what those materials can do in ways that matter for performance. That's a differentiator with legs because it's not a single product launch. It's a commitment to keep improving what's possible.
Now contrast that with brands still trying to sell yesterday's breakthrough. It's like trying to sell a Blackberry in an iPhone world. The innovation is dead on arrival because the market has already moved past it. People don't care that it was revolutionary once. They care about what's happening now.
And here's what matters: consumers follow what elite athletes and well-known people are using and buying. Those folks spend their days being different, testing new things, pushing boundaries. Your generic product that's already obsolete isn't going to cut it with them, and if they're not interested, neither is the rest of the market eventually. Sure, perfect your product. But you better already be working on what's next.
So what does that actually look like? It means treating 'what's next' as a standing agenda item, not something you think about when sales start slipping. It means putting budget toward R&D even when the current product is selling fine. The brands that do this well don't wait for a crisis to force evolution. They bake it into how they operate from day one.
Liquid Death is a textbook example. They launched nearly a decade ago with a dead-simple idea: water in a can. Punk aesthetic, aggressive tone, a category they essentially invented. But here's what they didn't do: they didn't spend the next ten years reminding everyone they were first. They kept moving. New products, new collaborations, new ways to make the category interesting. When Liquid Death uses the word innovation, it actually means something, because they've earned it repeatedly. Not just once.
That's the question every brand should ask honestly: when's the last time you actually did something new? Not iterated. Not refreshed the packaging. New. Because if you're still leaning on the same differentiator you launched with, you're not an innovator anymore. You're just a legacy brand that hasn't figured that out yet.
The shelf life of innovation isn't optional. It's physics. The only choice you have is whether you're sprinting toward what's next or clinging to what used to matter. And the market can tell the difference.